Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Wow. Not impressed this is the only way I can post anything to FB at the moment.

It seems facebook's glorious transition from interpreted PHP to cross-compiled C++ has not gone smoothly. In addition to totally screwing with the look and feel of FB again, they appear to have completely FUBARd the actual guts of the site.

Apparently the idea was to save cash and trouble reatnig ever larger server farms, by making the existing machinery work more efficiently - by running compiled code rather than PHP. They got quite a lot of kudos for this but my guess is that, as usual, not enough testing was done, and it's blown up. Very messily indeed.

Currently my iPhone will get some status updates (not all of them) - I can't log in to FB at all, or reset my password (everything is closed for "maintenance", that lowest of innuendos for "We're screwed right now, try again later")... oh dear.

As Dylan put it the other day - what's this Google Buzz business? Sounds interesting, even if it will always be in Beta, at least the bloody thing might work?

Or does all of this just feed my emerging belief that modern software systems are so huge and complex that we will either have to be connected and spend a lot of time with low-level angst and annoyance (with our Windows installation, our 27 inch iMac screen, our OS in general, OR our social networking sites) - OR - disconnect and go back to the way stuff was a few years back.

I'm getting v. close to closing the FB account for good, I suspect it wasn't doing me any good even when it was working...